Northwind

A complete redesign of Northwind Health's digital onboarding experience, transforming a fragmented, form-heavy process into a guided, intuitive journey that reduced drop-off and improved patient satisfaction from day one.

Live project

Client

Northwind Health

Scope

Product strategy, UX research

Duration

10 weeks

Year

2026

The problem

Northwind Health's onboarding flow asked new patients to complete a 12-step process spread across disconnected screens, insurance verification, and scheduling all lived in separate, poorly sequenced sections.

User data showed nearly 40% of patients abandoned onboarding before booking their first appointment. Support tickets revealed confusion around required fields, unclear progress indicators, and a lack of trust in how sensitive medical information was being handled.

The solution

We started with a full audit of the existing flow, mapping every screen against actual user behavior and support ticket themes to identify where and why people were dropping off.

From there, we restructured the entire journey into four clear phases. Verify, Share, Match, Book, each with visible progress and plain-language explanations of why information was being requested. We introduced contextual reassurance around data privacy at key friction points, simplified form fields to only what was essential upfront, and redesigned the provider-matching screen to feel more like a curated recommendation than a directory search.